Final Fantasy XIV is set to release its fifth expansion, Dawntrail, on July 2, and Square Enix is giving us a taste of how we can expect to perform when exploring Tural's sunny beaches and dense jungles this summer. The benchmark tool is now available.

The download is quite large at 3.9 GB, but inside is a character creator that allows you to create custom avatars that appear in the benchmark itself. Once inside, you can watch your meticulously crafted creation - or, if you're anything like me, an absolute mess, to be honest - make its way through a vast array of tropical jungles, open landscapes, flowing waterfalls, and rocky mountain climbs.

There are, of course, the inevitable beast battles to test your system, with plenty of blur effects, bursts of sparks, colorful spells, and heroic growls.

Personally, I've never found Final Fantasy XIV that appealing, but this certainly looks like an important graphical update. It looks pretty good, and at the end you get an overall score and performance rating, which again, if you're anything like me, you'll play at 1080p with dynamic resolution enabled for the thrill of seeing your performance ranked as "extremely high"! .

Look, sometimes you just need a little self-esteem boost.

Seriously, the settings menu offers plenty of options to get the most out of your system, from adjusting NPC physics to selecting upscalers and anti-aliasing settings.

Performance-specific options abound, suggesting that despite the graphical improvements, Square Enix spent time in the new expansion offering plenty of ways to tone down the pretty settings to work on a variety of hardware .

I named my character Elvis Von Wanglethorpe. But what I like about it is that it is a good benchmarking tool for comparing one's systems, and even if only for the laughs of the character creator, this is worth a try.